TORONTO -- The Toronto Maple Leafs saw this game as a chance to measure themselves against a quality opponent.

Perfectly understandable.

Hope they had a yardstick handy.

Or, when it came to special-teams play, the kind of equipment astronomers use to calculate light-years.

The Penguins' 5-2 victory at the Air Canada Centre was produced, in large part, by a three-for-five rampage by their power play, while the Maple Leafs had just two opportunities with the extra man and could do nothing with them.

With a disparity like that, it did not matter much that both teams had two even-strength goals.

The Penguins had sputtered with the extra man during most of their first four games, converting just two of 15 opportunities, but performed with lethal efficiency on their first three tries against the Leafs.

"Special teams -- although we've been doing a lot of good things -- haven't been our forte to this point," coach Dan Bylsma said. "But tonight, right from the start, our power play was executing."

Indeed, the two chances on which the Penguins failed to capitalize came during the final nine minutes of regulation, when the only thing to be settled was their margin of victory.

Matt Cooke gave them a 1-0 lead at 3:20 of the opening period by throwing a shot over the glove of Maple Leafs goalie Vesa Toskala for his first of the season, and the Penguins never were seriously threatened.

"We had a couple of shifts where we got caught out there, a few icings and they hemmed us in a few times," center Sidney Crosby said. "But we responded with good shifts after that."

Productive ones, at that.

The Penguins scored 31 seconds after Jay Rosehill got the Maple Leafs' first goal, 67 seconds after Niklas Hagman generated their second.

"Every time they got a goal, we came back right away and got one," said goalie Marc-Andre Fleury, who finished with 18 saves.

Sergei Gonchar got the Penguins' first goal with the extra man when he snapped a wrist shot through traffic and past Toskala from the high slot during a power play at 10:23 of the first.

"I think Toskala would want to take that back," Maple Leafs coach Ron Wilson said.

Truth be told, Toskala's teammates probably would have liked a mulligan for the entire opening period, when they were outshot, 14-2.

After Rosehill made it 2-1 at 2:01 of the second, Crosby collected the carom of an Evgeni Malkin shot that missed the net and tossed it past Toskala from along the goal line for his first point in three games.

"Any momentum we created with Rosehill's goal went right out the window," Wilson said.

Crosby obviously enjoyed scoring that one, because he got another at 14:31, this time deflecting in a Malkin shot while Rosehill was serving a boarding minor.

At that point, the Penguins were 3 for 3 with the extra man, which is the kind of productivity that makes teams reconsider the merits of playing an aggressive physical game.

Although playing tough is a staple of the Maple Leafs' style -- Colton Orr traded punches with Eric Godard of the Penguins just 2:19 into the game, the first of three fights -- the Penguins clearly aren't fazed by teams that try to punish them.

That's something the Maple Leafs presumably noticed while reviewing tapes of the Penguins' 5-4 victory in Philadelphia Thursday night.

"It's going to be like that against a lot of teams this year," defenseman Alex Goligoski said.

"They're going to want to set a tone with physical games against us.

"We've handled it pretty well so far."

Penguins Plus, a blog by Dave Molinari and Shelly Anderson, is featured exclusively on PG+, a members-only web site from the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette. Our introduction to PG+ gives you all the details.